Horace Campbell is Professor of African American Studies and Political Science at Syracuse University. His recent book is Global NATO and the Catastrophic Failure in Libya. He is author of: Rasta and Resistance From Marcus Garvey to Walter Rodney; Reclaiming Zimbabwe: The Exhaustion of the Patriarchal Model of Liberation; Pan Africanism, Pan Africanists and African Liberation in the 21st Century; and Barack Obama and 21st Century Politics. Follow on Twitter @Horace_Campbell.

Friday, May 10, 2013

With the death toll now over 900 in the wake of the collapse of the
textile factory in Bangladesh, there are newspapers and financial
newssheets all over the world decrying this event as a ‘disaster’ and
the ‘deadliest industrial accidents ever.’ However, the sweatshop
conditions for billions of workers around the world along with the
absence of occupational safety beg the question: Was this building
collapse an ‘accident?’ Why are there no rules relating to the
inspection of buildings and building codes in the countries such as
China, Bangladesh, Pakistan, India, Tanzania and South Africa? How was
it possible for the owners of this ‘establishment’ to continue
operations when the safety and structural conditions of the building had
been called into question? It is the contention here that this was no
accident but the logic of a form of accumulating wealth that placed a
premium on profits over human lives. Some have determined that this
period is like a second slavery.

In the past 30 years, the drive for super-profits has led corporations
to seek conditions where the working peoples have the least protection
with no safety regulations at places of work. Buffeted by banks and
hedge fund managers who respect no national boundaries, the bottom line
for the ‘investors’ takes precedence over human lives. Egged on by
institutions such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World
Bank, governments in the exploited countries of the world have been
outdoing each other to establish areas of intensified exploitation
called Export Processing Zones (EPZ). EPZ are sites of production where
international capitalists do not have to respect labour laws. The recent
fire resulting from an ammonium nitrate explosion at the West
Fertilizer Company storage and distribution facility in West, Texas, was
another example of worksites where there are no proper controls with
respect to occupational safety.

On top of the promotion of these EPZs, the efforts to roll back the
basic rights of workers have intensified. Bangladesh is one of those
societies where the rights of workers have been trampled upon to make
the society attractive to ‘foreign investors.’ One such attraction is to
ensure that there are no democratic rights such as the rights of
workers to assemble, the right to a living wage or the rights to
collective bargaining. During the period of the last capitalist
depression, the International Labour Organization (ILO) had campaigned
against wage slavery and at the end of the depression and war workers
fought to expand their rights and to strengthen collective bargaining
agreements and questions of occupational safety. As one form of cover up
of these new forms of exploitation, some international nongovernmental
organizations (NGOs) write on corporate social responsibility in order
to deflect from the growing calls for the protection of workers
internationally.

Today, the kind of exploitation that is present in Bangladesh is present
all over Africa. In Africa, the role of force in production had denied
basic rights to the working people during colonialism. After
independence, the politicians aligned with the soldiers to roll back the
basic democratic rights of workers. These forms differ in degree from
the child labour conditions in mining operations in the Eastern
Democratic Republic of the Congo, the use of semi-slave labour on
plantations in Cote d’Iviore, the absence of safety and health for
workers and ultimately in the use of religion and ethnic differences to
divide workers. When these divisive tactics fail, then the companies and
their police and security forces shoot workers as was the case of the
Marikana mines in South Africa. This column is a statement of solidarity
with the working people of Bangladesh and another call to push for
global rights, especially the rights of working peoples.

‘UNPRECEDENTED TRAGEDY, ONE OF THE WORST INDUSTRIAL ACCIDENTS IN THE WORLD’

This is the way the newspapers and journalists have sought to depict the
actions that led to the collapse of the eight storey building in Dhaka,
Bangladesh, on April 24, 2013. According to the BBC, ‘some 700 workers
have been killed in factory fires in Bangladesh since 2005. Garment
factory collapses in 2005 and 2010 claimed another 79 lives.’ In this
building collapse of April 24, there are now over 912 dead with over
2,500 injured in this latest building collapse. There is no clear
account of how many persons were in the factory at the time of the
collapse of the building because the factory owners have not given
precise numbers. It was reported that 2,437 people have been rescued.

There is still a search for more bodies in the wreckage of the
eight-story building that was packed with workers at five garment
factories. The building was supposed to be a five storey building. It
has been reported that the owner illegally added three floors and
allowed the garment factories to install heavy machines and generators,
even though the structure was not designed to support such equipment.
The factories were making clothing bound for major big name brand
retailers in North America and Western Europe. Factory owners such that
of the Rana Plaza are not unusual. This owner had claimed the building
was safe, and the factory owners had ordered workers into the building
despite their objections after serious cracks were found in the
structure on April 23, the day before the disaster.

The semi-slavery conditions of workers in the garment industry in
Bangladesh had been an open secret among ‘international investors.’ For
after all, one of the attractions for Bangladesh as a center for the
global textile industry was precisely the fact that working conditions
were poor. In November 2012, a fire at another garment factory in
Bangladesh that made clothes for Wal-Mart and Sears killed 112 people.
Supervisors had ordered the coerced workers back to work after the fire
alarm sounded, leaving workers trapped in the upper floors. In 2010,
27 people died and more than 100 were injured in a fire in a factory
that made clothes for high-street retailer Gap. Next door in Pakistan in
2012 a fire in a factory had killed more than 300 workers. Then the New
York Times reported that the Pakistan fire was the worst industrial
accident. http://tinyurl.com/8d7t9qt

Yet, in light of this tradition of coercing workers to toil in unsafe
conditions the media has called this building collapse an accident.
According to the mainstream media, the building collapse was one of the
deadliest industrial accidents ever.

TEXTILE WORKERS AND EXPLOITATION

Workers in the garment industry have always been open to super
exploitation. It was one of the centers of production where the modern
trade union movement emerged to fight for basic industrial rights. The
International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union (ILGWU) had been one of the
largest labour unions in the United States. This union had fought hard
for the rights of workers especially after the big garment disaster in
New York in 1911, Triangle Shirtwaist factory, which killed 146 workers.
One writer who has commented on the recent deaths traced the genealogy
of garment manufacturing and the succession of ‘accidents.’ In an
article titled “Clothed in Misery,” M. T. Anderson wrote,

‘Similar disasters happened here in the first phase of our national
industrialization — the 1878 Washburn mill explosion in Minneapolis, the
1905 Grover Shoe Factory disaster in Brockton, Mass., the 1911 Triangle
Shirtwaist Factory fire in Manhattan — but back when New England
textile mills were the beating heart of America’s mass-production
infancy, the most notorious was the 1860 collapse of the Pemberton Mill
in Lawrence, Mass.’ http://tinyurl.com/cnnm6mj

During the last capitalist depression the workers in the United States
fought for better wages and better working conditions. By the end of the
depression and the end of the war when workers gained confidence, the
capitalist moved the factories to areas of the United States where there
were no unions. Later when the workers were unionized in other parts of
the USA, the owners moved to low wage economies such as Bangladesh,
Cambodia, China, Haiti, India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka. US garment
manufacturers and textile owners had promoted the Africa Growth and
Opportunity Act (AGOA) to bring African societies into this web of sweat
shop production. However, the race to the bottom had been intense with
the IMF and World Bank promoting the interests of the big name brand
producers of textiles.

The April 24 building collapse is now going in the record book and the
way the media is writing about the criminal activities is to divert
attention from the alliance between the international garment
manufacturers and the local political/comprador elements in Bangladesh.
When the press writes about the role of corruption that led to this
disaster, the mainstream media tend to deflect attention from the
apparel sellers in Europe and North America.

It is against the recent history of the activism of international
capital to roll back the rights of workers where it is necessary to
locate the actions of the capitalists in Bangladesh. The Rana Plaza
complex which was not built as a factory to withstand the vibrations and
hectic conditions of producing garments is typical of the thousands of
cheaply built, unsafe sweatshops in Bangladesh employing workers at $38 a
month to churn out orders for some of the world’s largest corporations.
Global conglomerates, including some of the world’s best-known brands,
extract 60 to 80 percent profit margins from merchandise made in
Bangladesh, by pressing contractors to deliver the lowest possible
costs. The garment factories in Bangladesh generate 80 percent of the
country’s $24 billion annual exports. Grouped together in the Bangladesh
Garment Manufactures & Exporters Association (BGMEA) the
Bangladeshi ruling elite operates as a junior partner of international
big business such as H&M, JC Penney, C&A, Levi’s, Marks and
Spencer, Tesco and Nike. In the aftermath of the fire, the New York
Times editorialized that there were only 11 collective bargaining
agreements in Bangladesh. Writing under the byline, ‘Another Preventable
Tragedy in Bangladesh,’ this leading voice of liberal capitalism
lamented,

‘Meanwhile, there are just 11 collective bargaining agreements in the
entire country of 150 million people, and there are only a few unions in
the clothing industry. Workers who try to form unions are often fired
and beaten, sometimes even killed. Last year, a young labor leader,
Aminul Islam, was tortured and killed in apparent retaliation for his
work organizing garment workers.’ http://tinyurl.com/cwc8orc

What the leading newspapers of the world have neglected to say clearly
is that the conditions of the workers in Bangladesh have been the direct
result of the new form of sweatshop conditions internationally. The
Bangladesh Garment Manufactures & Exporters Association (BGMEA)
emerged as a force within the competitive race to move the production of
garments to this poor and exploited society. In this race to the
bottom, Bangladesh had risen to be the world’s second largest garment
producer, behind China, by giving international investors and their
local comprador allies a free hand. As in the early industrial era in
the United States when poor rural women were lured to these factories,
today, there are an estimated 4 million garment workers, mostly women
who toil in conditions that were supposed to have been left behind at
the end of the last war and depression..

At that historical moment, the ILO was one of the more well-known
international organizations as it fought for the rights of workers
internationally to ensure an end to poverty level wages and semi slavery
working conditions. Since its creation in 1919, the ILO adopted 184
Conventions that establish standards for a range of workplace issues.
Today very few workers are aware of these Conventions because the
discourses about corporate social responsibility turn the rights of
workers into the arbitrary philanthropic actions employers. This
philanthropic based approach to the rights of workers finds its echo in
the financing of international non-governmental organizations to focus
on micro credit schemes or other efforts that does not document the
sweat shop conditions Since the era of Thatcherism when there was a
total assault on the rights of workers, questions of health and safety
of workers have been replaced by the canard of corporate social
responsibility. It is not by accident that even in the advanced
capitalist countries one of the fundamental battles today is to retain
the rights of workers to defend their standard of living. It is not
enough for the top media to lament that ‘the severity and frequency of
these disasters are an indictment of global clothing brands and
retailers like.’

LESSONS FOR THE AFRICAN WORKERS

Throughout Africa, capitalists have campaigned to roll back the rights
of workers. One can measure the extent of undemocratic practices in a
society in relation to the amount of rights that have been retained by
the working people. The present invasion of Africa by big and small
capitalists has left shoddy buildings and poor conditions everywhere.
One month before the building collapse in Bangladesh, there was a
building collapse, one of the many such collapse in places such as
Nigeria, Kenya and Tanzania. The construction boom in Africa has been
taking place in a context where building codes are routinely ignored.

Western democracy experts have focused on narrow issues of elections and
parliaments without a concomitant analysis of the extent of the erosion
of rights of working peoples. The removal of basic safety and security
of workers in order to attract ‘investors’ is part of the current
political process promoted heavily by the World Bank. The more brutal
dictators such as Mobutu Sese Seko simply used troops to shoot workers.
In the aftermath of this form of wanton killings, militias have moved in
to ensure that mining operations in the Congo are never placed in a
situation where the miners have the basic rights for good pay and
safety. Just as in the mines, so it is in the plantations where child
labour has returned and the questions of occupational health deleted
from negotiations.

Capitalist from all corners of the world from Japan and China in the
East to the USA and Brazil with the Europeans full of experience
salivate on the super profits to be reaped from the situation in Africa
where there is a young work force without the protection of the state.
The young people of Egypt had worked with the April 6 movement to fight
for better conditions for Egyptian workers and it is this struggle of
the Egyptian workers that precipitated the revolutionary upsurge which
is still lingering in Egypt.

International capitalists are afraid of the kind of political mobilizing
in Africa that educated the Egyptian population, hence the new
pressures to present religion and religious allegiances to blunt
discussion of the conditions of workers. The Bangladesh building
collapse brings back the question of the rights of workers in all parts
of the world. Western European planners, in the face of the stirring
from below, seek to bring discourse about corporate social
responsibility, but as the workers in the Niger Delta has testified,
companies such as Shell Oil are adept at playing the game of using the
language of corporate social responsibility while working with the
military and private military contractors to police workers.

The experiences of removing the conditions of safety and collective
bargaining for workers in Africa and Bangladesh have found their way
back to the United States where the capitalists have been emboldened to
embark on a massive campaign to strip workers of their rights. This
blowback can be seen with the public struggles over collective
bargaining and absence of safety conditions in establishments. The most
recent example of the massive explosion and fire at the West Fertilizer
Plant is but one of the most graphic examples where the owners had
pushed for 'Exemption' From Safety Rules and Targeted Workplace
Inspections. Over the years the OSHA had cited the West Fertilizer
Plant for violations of respiratory protection standards, but did not
issue fines. This is because the OHSA has been disempowered in the era
of neo-liberalism. These capitalists have been pushing for exemptions in
Africa and the experience of this fire that killed 15 persons in April
exposed US citizens to the raging fires and unsafe conditions at
industrial and oil producing sites all over Africa. According to a
report in the Huffington Post, ‘By claiming the exemption, the company
became subject to other, less stringent requirements and avoided certain
OSHA and Environmental Protection Agency rules.’

It is these less stringent rules that have applied all over the world of
poor workers so that today most students do not know what OHSA stands
for. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration Is that body
which is supposed to inspect establishments to guarantee that the
conditions of work are safe for those toiling in the place of
production. In the aftermath of this fire that killed 15 persons and
displaced an entire city, readers understood that the OHSA had last
inspected the plant in 1985.

This kind of exemption which has been adopted by capitalists whether
from China or the USA dictates that there should be stringent
international standards about workers at places where there are
dangerous chemicals and toxins. In every part of the world of the poor,
one can see conditions where there are no rules relating to the
protection of the environment. This writer is challenging the young in
NGO community to refocus on the rights of the working people to build a
new politics.

SOLIDARITY ACROSS BORDERS

Workers all across Africa and their supporters who share a sense of
solidarity are pushing for the removal of the politicians and corporate
elements that align with foreign capitalists to establish sweat shop
conditions. At the moment of decolonization one of the most militant
fronts had been the working poor. It is this history of organization of
the workers that has to be brought back so that the struggles of the
African workers are linked to the struggles of the workers in
Bangladesh, China and India. The renewed campaign of the workers in
Africa can now in the short run link up with workers in Brazil, India
and China. As one component of the BRICS framework, there has been the
establishment of a forum to support the closer relationship between
workers in the BRICS societies. African workers, especially the workers
of the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) have the
necessary social weight to be able to challenge the capitalists in South
Africa as well as to be a major force in this forum of trade unions
from the Federative Republic of Brazil, The Russian Federation, the
Republic of India, the People's Republic of China and the Republic of
South Africa. This BRICS forum of workers has the capability of
organizing within a framework of more than 200 million organized
workers. This framework must be strengthened by the day to day struggles
to ensure that the kind of accident that took place in Bangladesh is a
matter of history.

As long as this criminal action is presented as an ‘accident’ and a
tragedy, then those who profit from the sweatshop conditions will shed
crocodile tears about the loss of lives. Militant and sustained actions
to defend the global rights of workers are now on the agenda
internationally. The All African Trade Union Centers and COSATU should
be in the forefront of pressing the ILO to mount a clear investigation
with the results being released to all parts of the world. It is only
vigilance and aggressive networking internationally that will ensure
that the Bangladeshi government and manufacturers do not simply make
cosmetic changes to safety and building standards.